Zhao Lianhai, the milk-melamine activist who is out of jail on probation, was the latest to add his name to a swelling list of activists, academics and artists outwardly opposing the outspoken Mr. Ai’s recent detention.

On April 5, two days after Mr. Ai was apprehended at a Beijing airport, Mr. Zhao posted a video online criticizing the government’s treatment of the artist and other activists recently detained, saying that without “the most basic standards of law, we all live in an environment of fear.” (See the video with an English-language transcript from the China Media Project here.) The next day, a message appeared on his Twitter feed [http://twitter.com/zhaolianhai] saying that people were knocking at his door, followed a few hours later by a message saying he had been taken in for questioning by the police. “I told them that if they wanted to set up the crackdown, then come on.” he wrote. “You can start with me.”

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Mr. Zhao told the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper, that authorities said they would put him back in prison if he continued talking publicly about Mr. Ai. He responded, he told the paper, by saying he would go on hunger strike.

“I repeatedly told them the situation would only get worse, or even spin out of control if they didn’t change their attitude,” he said, according to the SCMP.

Mr. Zhao was released on medical parole in December after being sentenced two and a half years in prison last year for inciting social disorder. He had been publicly protesting the country’s food regulation system after his infant son fell ill from drinking milk contaminated with melamine in 2008 while also organizing parents of some of the roughly 300,000 children who were were similarly sickened. According to a separate report by the SCMP, he had gone on hunger strike prior to his release and was force-fed through the nose by prison personnel.

Mr. Zhao isn’t the only Chinese activist coming out in support of Ai at a time when Chinese authorities are particularly sensitive to political dissent. A letter published in The Guardian on Friday calling for Mr. Ai’s immediate release included signatures from several Chinese artists and activists including prominent Beijing-based photographers Gao Zhen and Gao Qiang, better known as the Gao Brothers, and filmmaker Ai Xiaoming, a professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou.

Besides signing the letter, Ms. Ai (no relation to the Ai Weiwei) also posted an essay online, “Today, everybody can become Ai Weiwei” (flagged and translated by Global Voices [http://globalvoicesonline.org/2011/04/07/china-everybody-can-become-ai-weiwei/] in which she argued that the artist couldn’t be silenced because he’d built an audience “possibly in the hundreds of thousands.”

” In this audience which Ai Weiwei has left behind, there are countless more people who will continue and seek to realize his ideals,” she wrote. “In this sense, Ai Weiwei wins by default.”

Support for Mr. Ai has also reached beyond political reform activists. Several members of the central government’s Chinese Academy of Social Sciences have questioned Mr. Ai’s detention in recent days, including Yu Jianrong, a widely respected sociologist.

While it’s clear Mr. Ai’s predicament hasn’t silenced the government’s critics, far less certain is what consequences their willingness to speak will have for them down the road.

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